Last Modified: Saturday, September 21, 2013 at 9:30 p.m.

Dispatchers from the local police department, fire department and ambulance service were all in the same room, where the Tuscaloosa City Councilman and other members of the Tuscaloosa County 911 Communications District were observing operations.

“They all stood up and talked to each other. They brought up maps, pictures of the pool. Everybody was on the same page rather than having each agency talk to the caller one at a time,” he said. “They were able to get out there and save his life.”

The trip to Charlotte is one of many that board members have taken while considering building a consolidated E-911 center for Tuscaloosa County. Right now, 911 calls are answered by dispatchers at different law enforcement agencies. Officials here have long discussed consolidation as a way to eliminate some problems caused by transfers between the different agencies.

Board members are considering three possible sites for a consolidated 911 center.

The center would be headquarters for the 911 call-takers, who would answer 911 calls for all emergency agencies in the county, private ambulance services and as the location of the Tuscaloosa Emergency Management Agency.

All three proposed sites are on 529 acres that the Black Warrior Solid Waste Disposal Authority bought from the Alabama Department of Mental Health last year.

Members of the 911 board discussed but ultimately decided against sites near Sokol Park and Hargrove Road, near the Tuscaloosa County Health Department.

One possible site on the property is next door to Flatwoods Church and would cost $1.2 million for site preparation and road construction. The second site is nearby, accessed from Mt. Olive Road, and would cost an estimated $1.9 million. Engineers are conducting a cost analysis for a third site on the property where Camp Partlow was located.

The solid waste authority purchased the three-quarters of a square mile property adjacent to its Tuscaloosa County landfill for future landfill expansion and to buffer against eventual city growth. The board will work with the solid waste authority when selecting a preferred site.

The communications district has a bigger budget to work with this year thanks to a recent hike to telephone customer surcharges.

The Legislature created a state E-911 board and established a statewide flat rate of $1.60 for all landlines and cellphones that will go into effect Oct. 1. Surcharges varied widely by county — Tuscaloosa County charged the lowest at 50 cents per customer. The state board will reimburse each county at the rate that county charged as of April 30. That put pressure on the 911 board to raise the rate here to $2.76 in April. Residents will begin to pay the lower rate of $1.60 beginning Oct. 1, but the statewide commission will disperse money to the county based on the $2.76 rate. That means that the county 911 board is expected to collect $3.3 million annually.

That additional revenue will help with the cost of the consolidated 911 center, which will be partially underground to protect it from storms. The April 27, 2011, tornado destroyed the EMA operations center.

Additional money collected from the higher surcharge has allowed the commission to plan other necessary upgrades, said Tuscaloosa County E-911 director Rod Coleman. Commission members have visited 911 centers across the country and have planned a $1 million upgrade to equipment and the network that connects the three dispatch centers in the county.

“Our equipment now is 12 years old and is no longer manufactured,” Coleman said.

The new system will be redundant, meaning that equipment failure at one site wouldn't shut down operations there. There have been problems in the past when lines were cut because of construction in the area or power outages.

“It will be much less likely to fail because of the additional redundancy built into it,” Coleman said. “There will be one server at the Sheriff's Office and one at the Tuscaloosa Police Department and a network connection to Northport Police. If any of those were to crash for any reason, the other server could handle to call load by redirecting calls to other dispatch centers.”

That system should be in place by the beginning of 2014, he said. The new equipment will also be able to accept text messages when that technology becomes available in the future, Coleman said.

“We're continuing to look for ways to improve our current system and to improve it further in the future,” he said.

The board is also planning a CAD to CAD integration project, which will allow the three dispatch centers and the University of Alabama Police Department to share data. If a Tuscalosoa Police dispatcher were to key in a code for a bank robbery, for example, the system would recognize it as a serious crime and display the information on monitors of dispatchers at each location. That system should also be in place in a few months.

The board is expected to further discuss site location for the consolidated center at its October meeting.